Comments on: TSA searches body-casted three-year-old in a wheelchair

By: Elizabeth Schechter

Elizabeth Schechter — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:16:00 +0000

As horrible as this was for the family and child, I don’t see anyone pointing out that this happened TWO years ago, before the TSA exempted children from being searched.

By: Grok

Grok — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:06:00 +0000

The terrorists are laughing at North America. We are spending BILLIONS on an overblown threat….exactly what they wanted.
More people die in their bathrooms, children starve and die every day, don’t even talk about highway deaths! Where is the money spent on the real killers in our society?

Quite simply, A greedy few profit greatly from waging war and supplying security.

VIVA FEAR!!

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:04:00 +0000

It’s like the Cold War. In retrospect, the idea that the USSR could have occupied the US seems like a joke; they can barely even keep the electricity on over there. People just love to have something to freak out about.

By: flickerKuu

flickerKuu — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:40:00 +0000

I severely doubt your story about your 3 year old being stopped by the police. Did you mean it hypothetically? Try this with TSA by the way. They get paid like 7 dollars which is way less than it takes to hire someone who knows any laws. Try this on TSA and the only thing you will accomplish is waiting longer.

By: flickerKuu

flickerKuu — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:37:00 +0000

Ignorance? Are you saying there HAS been an attack? The fact is we spend way too many resources “pretending” to be safe. If we did nothing, we would have more resources, more freedom, more sanity, and the EXACT amount of plane terrorism. It’s a joke. If you think searching this little boy accomplishes anything than you sir, are the one already living in Ignorance.

By: Albie Farinas

Albie Farinas — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:23:00 +0000

It’s all incremental…. First they separate you from your child…. That’s okay…. Then they fondle your child…. That’s okay….. Then the next thing you know they’re sending you into the showers…. All in the name of this “abstraction” that they call the “War on Terror”…. Where does it stop being okay….? You, tell me…. If a supervisor ordered one of these inane clones to attach electrodes to your testicles and turn on the juice, they would blindly comply…. Perhaps that’s exactly what you need to wake you up….. However, you would probably think that it’s okay, since they are protecting us from “terrorists”… Ple-e-aseee……. These TSA employees are creeps

By: Jay Jamrie Jamerson

Jay Jamrie Jamerson — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:01:00 +0000

if only we all could live with such ignorance… i wish i could live with the, it hasnt happened in the last 200 years so its not gunna happen now, idea… That would be great!

By: Jay Jamrie Jamerson

Jay Jamrie Jamerson — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:57:00 +0000

maybe noone is aware but this was in 2010 and now its a big problem… DGAF! search everybody and everything

By: slackwarerobert

slackwarerobert — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:48:00 +0000

I blame the parents. My child knew enough at that age to ask to see the warrant, and if he was being detained. Now you talk about funny, the look on a cops face when a four year old demands to see the warrant, and if he is free to go. I was never so proud of him, and the cops jaw hit the floor, he just got flustered and couldn’t make a sensible sentence.
The TSA is even better in that they would have no evidence of the child giving up it’s rights, since I doubt the 3 yo bought a ticket.
Study up on local citizen arrest laws, then use them. He may beat the rap, but he will still be fingerprinted, searched, and have it on his record as arrested for child molestation.

Albie Farinas: You will find it is much cheaper to build your own, then you don’t have to get robbed just doing basic maint.

flickerKuu: Can’t reply to you so… He was 4, but I had been drilling it in to him since two. Cops are not your friend, they only want your money or your freedom. We were at an illegal stop and they were trying to coerce him into being sepperated from me. I was smiling so much, I was never more proud then at that moment when he stood up to them.
Yes arguing the law with an idiot TSA will waste your time, that is why you study up on local laws to arrest them. Have you noticed that the only difference in the uniform and the nazi SS is the insignia? Same jack booted thug getup.
But standing up for your rights is never a waste of time.

By: Navin_Johnson

Navin_Johnson — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:54:00 +0000

Comparing TSA workers to the extermination and torture of millions, these are the arguments of *adult* men and women on Boing Boing. Embarrassing and disgusting.

By: Albie Farinas

Albie Farinas — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:09:00 +0000

I mean REALLY….! I don’t know what everybody’s so upset about…. If you don’t like being searched or having your children fondled, buy yourself a jet….. I did, and now all I do is drive up to the tarmac grab my overnight bag and hop on my jet…. No searches, no questions, no fondling, no indignity of being treated like a worthless peon…. I can even smoke cigarettes or weed while in the air, use my cell and pad during takeoffs and landings, get drunk, have temper tantrums and scream obscenities at my flight crew… Travel for me is just wonderful…! If you want to buy a private jet, you should just go into the mortgage and foreclosure business, or just get a job with Bank of America, J P M Chase, Bain Capital, or get elected to public office, in which case, you can use my jet anytime you want, so long as you reciprocate every once in a while by providing oral sex for me…..

Love and Kisses to all you unworthy pedestrians,

Albie

By: Albie Farinas

Albie Farinas — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:24:00 +0000

Yes and the SS guards at the concentration camps also knew that they would get fired if they did not ad-hear to SS policy in the extermination of Jews. The same applies to the Roman Catholic Christians who would not ad hear to the extermination of heretics during the inquisition…. If you take the job, you are an undignified degenerate by definition….. NICE…!

By: Condor30303

Condor30303 — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:21:00 +0000

“Of course the child will be scared…he doesn’t know what the dickins is going on! But he’ll survive 5 minutes of discomfort…..”

He’s also getting a good dose of conditioning to understand he belongs to the Government and must submit to whatever it demands. By the time he is old enough to vote he will be nice and compliant.

By: Erin W

Erin W — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:17:00 +0000

Safe from transphobes. The new machines don’t show enough detail to compromise my safety by showing the operators that I’m trans. The old machines or a thorough pat down had I chosen to opt out would have. I’d rather not take that risk.

By: Lobster

Lobster — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:58:00 +0000

I was trying to make a joke, that the three-year-old was actually an explosive. Arm as in, “prime for detonation,” not “provide with weaponry.”

By: questionair

questionair — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:29:00 +0000

completely unexceptable the poor child is in a wheel chair really stupid tsa people they could have showed some sympathy and told the child it would be ok and atleast have let the mother and father confort him..he is a child not binladin come on stupid tsa..!

By: BombBlastLightingWaltz

BombBlastLightingWaltz — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:48:00 +0000

Indeed.

By: AviSolomon

AviSolomon — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:03:00 +0000

Barry Schwartz provides an apt analysis of the root causes:
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom.html

By: Anon_Mahna

Anon_Mahna — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:48:00 +0000

http://www.explosm.net/comics/2708/

By: flickerKuu

flickerKuu — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:46:00 +0000

This is just plain stupid. I’ll take my chances with “terrorism”from now on if we can stop taking our shoes off and stop hassling 3-year olds and the elderly. How many planes have blown up in the last 200 years? And we are doing this crap? Come on.

By: pookiepookieca

pookiepookieca — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:31:00 +0000

This is what happens when you give mall guards a bit of power…

By: RedRider67

RedRider67 — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 05:40:00 +0000

Most intelligent comment yet. And I shudder for all the folks above and below who are so busy navel-gazing that the impact of this experience on the child is barely worth commenting on.

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 05:15:00 +0000

They might put bombs up the child’s anus. Should we check that? You can never be too safe, right?

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 05:12:00 +0000

I didn’t want to have to resort to this graphic, but they left me no choice. ;D

By: hypnosifl

hypnosifl — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:20:00 +0000

For those who think this is a plausible threat, do you think it's a piece of cake for a terrorist/drug lord to get a small child that will trust them enough to act like the person is their parent? If this presented no major difficulty you'd think it'd be a common strategy for drug lords at least, but from some googling I get the sense that it's extremely rare, for example this story on child drug mules mentions no one younger than 11. It's not that using 3-year-olds for terrorism is impossible of course, but it's rational to weigh threats by our estimates of the likelihood terrorists would go to the trouble rather than to go by the principle that "anything you can imagine and don't take intrusive active measures to prevent is most likely what the terrorists are planning to do." Millions of moviegoers saw how the Joker sewed a bomb inside someone's stomach in the last Batman movie, it's certainly not completely impossible someone would actually do that, does that mean everyone needs to go through an MRI before boarding a plane? The reality is that most terrorists are not criminal masterminds, the most pressing threats are not likely to overlap much with the most diabolically clever ones we can imagine (remember when everyone was sure after 9/11 that terrorists were going to get Ph.D.'s in nuclear physics or genetic engineering to build nuclear bombs and super-diseases? How'd that prediction turn out?)

By: Syn -

Syn - — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:03:00 +0000

that’ll teach them!

By: SomeGuyNamedMark

SomeGuyNamedMark — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:55:00 +0000

Give a 3yr old passenger enough sugar and maybe an espresso and you won’t need a bomb, the pilot will crash the plane.

By: Syn -

Syn - — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:54:00 +0000

I cannot believe you still let this happen. You will write to every representative when the internet is about to go down (which is a great thing in itself) But are you still this afraid, to not fight against this sort of bullshit? There has got to be something the populace can do.

By: Guest

Guest — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:20:00 +0000

No, but each bomb is remarkably similar in cost to a teacher’s annual salary.

By: KittyDelAmour

KittyDelAmour — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:12:00 +0000

Last time I checked, *we* weren’t the ones strapping bombs to our children.